A few thoughts on dividends and DGI strategy

Dividends: frenemy status achieved

A bit of a rambling post from one of the authors incoming. You may have seen – and hopefully celebrated with us – the other author’s recent success overcoming the $0 net worth mark and powering ever further up the mountain. Godspeed, friend!

On the other hand, this author collects a few dozen dollars in dividends every single night. One of my favorite Buffettisms is, “If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.” Counting sheep is for the sheepdogs; count dividends instead and tell Ambien to take a hike.

I love dividends. While many DGI investors set up DRIP’s, my preference is to pool dividends and diversify based on which businesses represent the best opportunity at the time the pool is big enough to justify a brokerage commission fee. This only makes sense in accounts where that watershed moment happens at least once per year. For smaller accounts, which I have a few, DRIP’ing is simpler and puts afterburners on the compounding engine. Dividends are easy to love as they come into my account, but what about how it affects the businesses writing the checks?

Proof is in the dividend pudding

If you’ve been through the tech bubble bursting or the Great Recession – and I won’t date myself by saying whether or not I observed both – then you’re a bit weary of stocks.

You’d be stupid to not cast a keen eye at the Dow. Fortunately, I used knowledge to overcome fear and spent a lot of time learning about investing before walking into the casino. It doesn’t look like Vegas now (scammy POS stink of a city), more like a green-thumb nursery holding some delicious fruit hidden amongst long dead undergrowth and a few sneaky poison ivy vines.

One of my key takeaways from all the investing reading I’ve done is that you cannot fake a dividend. No matter how much you cook your books, if you have to write a multi-billion dollar check quarterly, the cash is either there or it is not. That knowledge helps separate the balm from the toxins and makes investing a bit more palatable.

Taxation of dividends

Dividends are double-taxed, once as net income for the business and again when the deposit lands in my account. For IRA’s and their ilk, this is fine – no tax on the personal side. But for taxable brokerage accounts, this can be a major pain in the ass depending on your income. I’m pursuing a low-bracket early retirement, but until I gather the nuts to overcome FIRECalc’s lowest limbo line and my own OneMoreYearitis, that 15% haircut by Uncle Sam cuts a little close for comfort.

Not only does the tax code put a little bitterness into the sweetness of dividends, but I have some philosophical qualms about the practice as well.

Dividends as a business model

Companies that pursue ever-increasing dividends at all cost have spawned a massive Dividend Growth Investor (DGI) movement. It’s a great way to invest, and I don’t have many bones to pick with the approach at a personal level.

However, I do believe that corporations may be selling themselves short by focusing on sending checks out the door. In some cases, repurchase programs are the best approach. In others, opening new sales channels or investing in R&D would be more appropriate. All told, a lot of cash is allocated one way or another in any profitable business, and I do not believe that sending shareholders ever-larger checks is always the best approach.

I’m also curious if we’ll look back in a decade or two and rename DGI’ers to yield-chasers, blaming them – rightly or wrongly – for a blue-chip wipeout after driving up all the good DGI names to bubbly heights. But I digress. I hate to see businesses try to scrape out a 2% raise to stay on some arbitrary “Royalty” list of precious DGI stocks (our own cheeky metaphor of a name notwithstanding) when the core earnings suffer from a lack of investment in the business itself.

Dividend cuts are so disdained by the investing community that buying a stock after a dividend cut has been shown to be an academically wise maneuver. Ask Grandma and Grandpa what they thought of GE’s decision in the depths of the Great Recession. Still, sometimes, it’s the best course for the business. And I don’t mind a bit if one of my holdings must make that call in the midst of a challenging environment. After it slashed its dividend to almost nil, I didn’t sell one of my major oil investments after I gobbled up several names during the oil price collapse, and the business has begun to reward me handsomely for my patience after others fled.

What about growth?

I’m not a big fan of the “Growth” vs “Value” or “Growth” vs “Income” simplifications. It’s all investing. There’s just something that makes running a business ever-easier when next year’s profits end up 8%, 10%, or even 15% higher than this year’s: year after year, 10K after 10K. The cash just keeps on coming. And even though some of these big-growth names sport high P/E ratios—eliminating them from conventional “Value” approaches—or they don’t pay a juicy yield—falling off the screeners used by DGI’ers and pure-income plays—they do soar like Jordan after perpetual eye-popping earnings reports.

Every year that net income increases by 10%, the P/E ratio drops so quickly. A 29X earnings number quickly becomes 16X cost-to-earnings ratio after you make a purchase, and you see capital appreciation along the way, maybe with a small divvy check in the mail. I’m thinking of Visa and Nike here, and those two businesses ought to be in everyone’s portfolio, no matter his/her investing style.

Disclosure: long V, long NKE. The book linked to Amazon is an affiliate link, and we earn a pittance if you purchase it; you earn a tremendous amount of investing knowledge if you read it.

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About The Author

I'm at the tail end of a white-collar career, an age when many of my peers are moving into middle management or senior leadership roles.
Combining a keen sense of frugality with a high income, I was able to sock away a substantial amount of money early in my life. Helped along by a perfectly timed recession and subsequent bull market, my passion for investing turbocharged my retirement efforts, and I’m on the verge of submitting my notice. But first – I have some loose ends to tie up and a few extraneous goals to meet while my marketable skills are at their peak.

4 Comments

I agree about the oil stocks. I have a decent amount of my portfolio allocated to the energy sector. When they were at their lows back in 2015/ 2016 I also took the opportunity to buy more instead of selling. It does two things for you. 1. Lowers the overall cost basis for that company. 2. Will grow faster at the lower levels if you DRIP, providing more passive income for the long term if you can wait it out.

I’m glad to hear you loaded up during the oil price drop. It seems that many DGI or dividend-focused investors saw the buying opportunity and jumped. That may be the single best attribute of the DGI strategy: a system that provides knowledge to overcome fear in order to “catch a falling knife” when the investor thinks the current circumstances are temporary setbacks and that the divvy’s will keep on flowing. Your DRIP points are spot-on: lower prices are the friend of the reinvestor!

I’m DGI all the way. Sure, we can have discussions about total return, value investing, growth, etc. but when it comes to dividends I have just one goal every year and that’s to increase my passive year over year income annually. Thanks for sharing.

I do love the simplicity of that one annual number of cash hitting my account. It’s such a clear-cut metric, and you’re motivated to safeguard what you’ve built by selecting high quality cash-flows. You’re also motivated to grow the amount not just by acquiring more shares but also by passively letting your position compound through DRIP’s or just through annual dividend raises. I definitely track that # even though I’ll sometimes opt for Visa, for example, which barely moves the needle for current dividends, but it does provide turbo-booster growth on its sub-1% yield. One day that yield on cost will be substantial, perhaps higher than the high-yield stalwarts of today.